Sunday, May 17, 2015

Kill A Cat

In an anonymous motel room, they study the transethical imperative. To enter, you must kill a cat with nothing but your philosophy. She’s crawling up the ivy with her face all a blur. The poet smiles as they lead him to the executioner. The middlemen are bleeding from the neck. Foreign exchange students, building a bomb in the basement. Little boys, screaming for their mothers. Communication and violence spread the same way, like a disease.
His brain was a television. They flipped the channels back and forth. His brain was an ice cube, carved out of pink flesh, impaled on a toothpick and dropped in a martini glass. He wanted that drink so bad he could taste it. His arms were crossed underneath his body like dead needles under a thousand haystacks. In a dark place in the far corner of his brain he began to see the blind spot, an empty hole where his soul should be, screaming like a banshee with her lips all red and full of blood, pulsing like the tip of his finger sliced clean off with a combat knife, blood like a funnel, blood like a funnel cake at the state fair, blood caked all over his brain like barnacles on a ship, his spine sunk beneath the ocean like a coral reef, his bones a shipwreck, his brain a cloud of blood, bits and pieces cast over the side, a feeding frenzy.
Talk show hosts for breakfast. The guy’s a maniac. You can’t reason with a maniac. Insurance company called it an accident. She’s dating some car dealer. Her pussy cracked open like a fortune cookie. A little army of kids trailing behind her. A bottle of gin to put them to bed. The hotel lobby was covered in a fine sheen of plasma, all that was left of the dinner guests. His cover story was quite simple, a business man in town looking for a piece of underage ass. No one would ever suspect. Especially if high on industrial solvents. Up through Florida and then by truck to Michigan. A safe house outside of Detroit. A suitcase full of human flesh. A straight razor in the glove compartment. She laughed as he poured the drinks.